When he first caught a glimpse of the papers in an Atlanta document dealer's office in December 1994, "my tongue was out to my knees," recalls reporter Seymour Hersh. And why not? It looked like one of the juiciest discoveries yet in the epic journalistic deconstruction of the Kennedy presidency. The documents purported to show that Kennedy had set up a trust fund of $600,000 for Marilyn Monroe's mother, supposedly to buy the actress's silence over her alleged affair with the President.
That startling revelation was on track to make headlines--MARILYN BLACKMAILED J.F.K.!--for the book that Hersh had spent more than four years working on, The Dark Side of Camelot (due in November from Little, Brown), as well as for a two-hour ABC documentary timed to coincide with publication. But last week Hersh and the network made an extraordinary pre-emptive strike--against themselves. In a segment of the magazine show 20/20, the network asserted that the documents are, almost certainly, fake.
The papers came from Lex Cusack, a former law clerk in Connecticut who claims he found them among documents belonging to his father, Lawrence Cusack, a New York City attorney who died in 1985. Though the documents had been authenticated, Cusack claimed, by handwriting experts (and many had been sold to collectors for a total of some $4 million), the more the journalists looked at them, the more the papers began to look fishy. Last spring Mark Obenhaus, the free-lance producer working with Hersh on the TV documentary, noticed that one letterhead dated 1961 carried a ZIP code--before ZIP codes had been introduced. Experts subsequently brought in to examine the typewritten documents, moreover, concluded that they could not have been written during the period claimed. (The typewriters had self-correcting tape, for example, which wasn't available until the 1970s.) Confronted on camera by ABC anchor Peter Jennings with evidence of the fraud, Cusack stammered that the papers might have been later copies of originals, while denying that he forged them. Reached by TIME later, Cusack, a paid consultant on the documentary, said he was "surprised and disappointed" at being sandbagged on the air by his employer. "We have some information that refutes what their forensic experts said," he added, without providing details.
Hersh has removed the chapter in his book that was based on Cusack's documents and rewritten portions of the rest to reflect that omission, and the book is still scheduled to come out in November. ABC News president David Westin says he still "hopes and expects" to air the documentary later this year but won't make a final decision until it is completed. Hersh says he considers the excision only a minor blow to his wide-ranging examination of Kennedy's public and private life, and claims he felt "tremendous relief" at no longer having to deal with "those crazy papers that didn't add up."